So, for the last couple of days I’ve been working on a mobile version of this site. It’s the same site, same pages, just the design is tweaked to make it look better on a mobile handset. It’s easy enough to do, using CSS. CSS stands for ‘Cascading Style Sheets’, and is a way of labeling elements on a web page, and then controlling the way that everything that has that label is formatted. But because the machine you look at a web page on can be identified as a computer or as a mobile, you can have a different stylesheet for each type.
Continue reading “New Adventures In Mobile (CSS)”
2008 in review – Blog posts for musicians, Pt 1
It’s been an amazing year for me – a proper round-up of the year will be coming soon. But I thought that first I’d pull together some of the things I’ve blogged about this year. So this is part 1 of a compilation of links to my blog posts for musicians this year –
Back in May/June, I did a series of posts about Social Media for Musicians:
- Social Media thoughts Pt 1 – my background and history.
- Social Media Thoughts Pt 2 – The Playground Of The Curious.
- Social Media thoughts Pt 3 – the ongoing conversation…
- Social Media thoughts Pt 4 – the podcast!
- Social Media Thoughts 5: Sharing the Love pt 1 – fans.
…ah, clearly i didn’t finish that last one… 🙂
Then in July, I did a series on my thoughts on bass teaching, and music teaching in general:
- Teaching ideas part 1. There’s no electric bass in most orchestras.
- Teaching Ideas Pt 2 – There’s no syllabus for punk and reggae.
- Teaching Ideas Pt 3 – Teaching is therapy
- Teaching Thoughts Pt 4 – Pleasing parents is bad for the student.
These had some really great comments off the back of them…
And here, in roughly chronological order, are my favourite posts from Jan – August:
- where youtube fits in the new music economy
- The Steve ‘n’ Jeff Show – podcast available now…
- Critical, pragmatic, self-belief – an artist’s life-blood…
- the ecosystem is wrong… why facebook for music still doesn’t beat Myspace…
- perception trumps design – why Myspace still works…
- Creativity and Socially Networked Marketing – the good and the bad.
- The dangers of technodarwinian web 2.0 marketing for musicians
- One True Fan – thoughts on Street Teams.
- Two jobs in one – the perils of being artist and label.
- The Musical Mechanics of ‘Feeling’: Wordless Story Telling
- Some thoughts on ‘Free’ methodology and practice…
- Thoughts and Questions on Originality.
- Interaction, Conversation, Respect: the death of broadcast marketing on the web…
- “Nobody owes you their attention†– thoughts on multi-act gigs and audiences…
- Paradigm is no measure of quality – what to do when you’re ‘different’…
- It pains me to say it, but Billy Bragg couldn’t be more wrong…
- Working Class Musicians
- The foolishness of Copying Radiohead (or ‘why poor people vote for lower taxes’)
There you go, that lot would make a pretty good e-book, if I ever get round to editing out the typos, and shortening some of my more overly-verbose entries 🙂
Next entry will cover Sept – Dec, and then the rest of what’s happened this year! If I don’t get to it til tomorrow, have a great new year, see you in ’09!
If you particularly like any of the posts, please share the links around, either via the ‘share this’ option below, or just by forwarding the URL to people who think might like to read them.
Listen to the Lawson/Dodds/Wood album now (if you want to :) )
First up, a HUGE thanks to everyone who’s bought the album already – thanks for the feedback, and thanks for investing in the music. It means that (if sales continue as they are) we’ll be able to pay for the pressing of the CD without going into any kind of debt… makes the whole process of being a musician who releases the kind of music that takes more than an hour to record MUCH more viable.
So, yeah, thanks. You all rule.
For those of you who, understandably, have been waiting to hear the album before dropping your money on it, your wait is over! Hurrah!
Via the wonders of last.fm, you can now listen to the album in its entirety before choosing whether to buy it. Just click on each track in turn in the player below –
We really hope you enjoy it.
I love the way releasing new music can inspire all kinds of other stuff around it – one of the nice things it does is it causes an upsurge in sales of back catalogue albums (sold more of my solo CDs in the last week than in the previous 2 months of online sales – and it means that Grace And Gratitude is now properly out of print on CD, but still available as a download 🙂 ), but it also gets me to do the things I should’ve done ages ago. Like uploading the Steve Lawson and Lobelia Live In Nebraska EP to Last.fm as well. It’s uploaded, and as I write is ‘processing’, but should be there before you read this…
Also, in more geeky news, for those of you that want to point friends to where they can get the album, the short URL www.stevelawson.net/ldw now goes to the shop page (which has the player embedded, and links to all the youtube videos too…)
Lawson/Dodds/Wood – Numbers: Available to order and download NOW!
Hurrah! Finally! It’s up.
Yes, I know it took me flippin ages, but it’s there now, in the shop – Click here to go to the store and buy it!
Q – OK, so what do you get for your money?
A – an immediate digital download of the album – encoded at 256kbps (VBR*), beautifully and lovingly mixed, mastered and sounding amazing. PLUS an extra 45 minutes (give or take 2) of extra material: There are 3 of the raw improv tracks that Roy, Patrick and I recorded in the studio, exactly as we recorded them before they got mixed and mastered, and one completely exclusive track from the improv sessions, that’s not on the album (I’ll talk about that in a video later on today).
AND, of course, you get the CD, including world-wide postage, which will be sent out on or before November 24th 2008. It’ll be in the usual Pillow Mountain Records deluxe gatefold all-cardboard packaging, designed by the genius that is Kenny Laurenson
Q – and how much will all this cost me
A – £12.00 (as I said, including postage)
Right, so why should you order it now? Well, obviously, it’s not available anywhere else yet, so if you’re dying to hear it, this is the only place you’ll be able to get it for now – it won’t be up on iTunes/eMusic/whichever other digital store you usually use for months. Srsly. And the extras aren’t available anywhere. And won’t be for a very long time. Certainly not for ‘free’.
But more than that, it’s about future investment. If you order it now, we can cover the cost of pressing the CDs before we even put the record out. No debts, no loans, just sending the music to the people who want to hear it without any record companies or distribution companies getting in the way. We get to make the music we love, you get to hear the music we make, and no-one has to go without food to make it happen.
Think of it as arts patronage if you like, only you’re not giving ‘a donation’, you’re just buying direct from the artist to make your arts-money go further.
We’re also happy to sign any advance order CDs that you want signing, so feel free to indicate that in with your order (once the CDs out, it’ll be much harder for us to make sure we’re in a position to do that, given that we don’t live in some Monkees-esque fun-palace of gorgeous improv. We do lead normal lives… so consider it another added bonus)
Thanks so much! We’re REALLY excited about the album, as it seems is pretty much everyone who’s heard it.
And don’t forget that I will be carrying a digital copy with me, so should you have any kind of laptop or whatever with you, I can drag a copy onto your computer if you want to buy it there and then, and I’ll take your address and send you the CD when it comes out, same as if you ordered it online.
Subscribe to this blog via email…
I know, it’s terribly old fashioned, and I’m always complaining about it, but the simple truth is, some people prefer to manage their info all in one place – their email inbox – and that’s fine by me. So here’s the place where you can subscribe to this blog via email, and have each post sent to you automatically. How cool is that?? Just fill in the form below, and each post I upload will be sent to you! Simple as…
(of course, it goes without saying that your email won’t be used for anything else, by me or anyone else.)
One from The Vault – interview from BassRocket.com
In the process of transferring my website over to this lovely shiny new format, I removed a lot of dead links to reviews and interviews that were no longer online. Fortunately, I knew a few of the writers, and so was able to get hold of transcripts of the original interviews direct from them.
One that I found was this one from BassRocket.com – the site itself no longer exists, but the article was written by Andy Long, a music journalist that had interviewed me a number of times for different magazines, and always asks interesting questions, the answers to some of which surprised me (I tend not to have pre-written answers to interview questions, so often come up with stuff on the spur of the moment that I look back on and learn from 🙂 )
It’s also interesting to see how few of the projects that I listed as ‘upcoming’ in that article actually happened… The planned recording and gigs with Eric Roche is particularly hard to read about, as Jan 2005 was when Eric was in his short remission period between his first bout with cancer and when it came back and tragically took his life. We talked a lot through his recovery time about our plans for gigs and recording, but nothing ever happened. One of the few big regrets of my career.
Anyway, have a read of the article, it’s from a few months after Grace And Gratitude came out and it’s a good ‘un!
New site, new blog home, new shop…
As you’ll have seen by now (unless you’re reading this in an RSS reader), there’ve been a lot of changes round here – the design of stevelawson.net has now shifted into wordpress, the shop is still zencart, but has been given a facelift and most significantly, the blog is now hosted here too, integrated into the rest of the site.
The task of getting everything to forward to the right place was pretty huge – given how highly this blog indexes in google, it was vital that all those link redirected properly to this one, and I had SO much help from my herd of sure-footed trusty geeks: James Stewart, Rev. Gareth, Mike Arthur and The Captain. Gentleman and scholars to a man. I now fully understand why properly trained geeks get paid so much money – they can save you so much money. James did a couple of things this afternoon that quite literally saved me 3-4 complete days of editing URLs and stuff…
The tags from the old site still haven’t copied across, and a lot of the little pages that are littered around the old design still need to be imported and linked to (old gig reviews etc), but we’re getting there, slowly.
I hope you like the new design. Feel free to try out the new shop – if anything does go a bit weird, just email me, and we’ll sort it out – there’s no way you’re going to lose money on the deal, cos it’s actually me who runs it, so if there’s a problem, I can just FTP you the files for the download or pop a CD in an envelope, no worries 🙂
Enjoy…
stevelawson.net forum upgrade
I’ve just done a loooong overdue forum upgrade from an old version of PHPBB2.something to PHPBB3.brandnew – head over to www.stevelawson.net/forum and check it out. And if you’re not signed up already, please do and join the conversation :o)
Easy download of Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt I
Was just editing the MP3s page on my site to reflect the fact that everything on there is now fully streamable, when it occured to me that the Last.fm widget on there for LLFAAF Pt I makes all the download tracks from that album available direct from the widget… So here it is!
Don’t forget, you can get all of Pt II from Reverb Nation also completely FREE!
Between Last.fm and ReverbNation, there are so many great ways to get your tunes out there if you’ve got stuff you want to give away. I recommend both!
Downloading made easy, the Reverb Nation Widget way!
Not sure why I didn’t think of this before, but you can download all of Lessons Learned from An Aged Feline Pt II from the widget below. It’s a four step process, as follows:
1. click the word ‘songs’ at the top of the widget.
2. click on ‘What Was Going On’
3. put your email address into the box that appears (you have to sign up for my mailing list to get the download)
4. while the track is playing, click the little download arrow to the right of the play-timeline, underneath the tracklist.
Then repeat steps 2 and 4 – click on each song and click download. And you’ll have a shiny digital loveliness copy of LLfaAF Pt II.
One of the fun things about doing this experiment with the free downloads has been listening back to two albums I’ve not listened to of mine for a long time. LLfaAF Pt II is the record where I fell in love with my fretted 6 string bass – The majority of the tracks on it are recorded with that bass. Melodically, it’s probably the most ‘jazz’ thing I’ve done, as I was quite consciously experimenting with more ‘outside’ lines and some bigger intervals in the melodies. It was nice to go back and rediscover a few things I was doing then that I haven’t done since, and am now wanting to reincorporate into my playing.
For those of you who are musicians wanting to make your music available in different places, Reverb Nation widgets are a great way to do it – if you go to my page and click on the widgets tab, you’ll see all the ones available. You can even make the one above the main music interface on your blog.
It’s a good way to manage collecting mailing list subscriptions in exchange for the free stuff, rather than just giving it away AND having to play for the bandwidth from your own server.
And of course, your legions of fans can include your widgets on their myspace page, blog, facebook page, bebo page. etc etc.
As the user-base of Reverb Nation grows, it may increase in native currency. For now, it’s largely about traffic you send to your page, and the widgets it makes available.
Though the nice thing about it being pretty small right now is that I’m at Number 2 in their jazz charts! – that’s 2nd out of 1789 ‘jazz’ artists. And that’s without even being proper jazz. Good work.